As a kid I was wanting to learn how things worked and was constantly pushed by my parents to play with things, figure them out, learn. Of course, this got me in trouble a few times and one of them was when I got grounded from the family computer. The Gateway Computer that sported the hottest and fastest Pentium known to man. A gig didn’t exist yet, Intel was king and Weird Al Yankovich published two hit songs, It’s all about the Pentium and White and Nerdy. Zero Cool and Acid Burn fell in love to be the ultimate hacker love story in Hackers and Sandra Bullock took her turn as nerd in The Net. This post would be immediately deleted by the Cyber Police is the Matrix wasn’t mentioned as Neo turned everyone’s attention to asking the question, what is the Matrix? All of these movies captivated me as I leaned more and more into wanting to find out, what exactly the Matrix was.
Knowing I’d have to learn a lot of different things at a young age, the Computer eventually became this constant Rubik’s cube I could mess with, learn new things and do whatever I wanted, the tools and manuals to learn what I wanted to do were already installed in the PC! Being grounded from the Cow Computer really hurt my feelings as I couldn’t hang out with friends already, I lived in a bubble built by my parents and there was nothing else to do.
Finally, I’d just had enough and went to the good ‘ol cow, powered it up and was met with a password. There was nothing I could do, except stare at it for hours in defeat as there was nothing else to do, I missed my cow friend. Later that week, an IT guy showed up to look at the cow to fix something so I just hung out with him and watched. He showed me some things, I looked and learned. He was stumped by the password, asked and looked for some random piece of paper my parents hid that had it written down on it with no success. He told me to turn around and next to me landed a little silver watch battery. He asked me to hand it to him, then he explained what he had done because my parents had no idea what the password was. It was instilled in me to be the home IT guy and he would teach me some things as long as I didn’t say anything about the battery trick. I promised and he left me with Quake installed on the cow, my life had changed forever as I learned there is so much more to computing than just sitting behind a keyboard drawing pictures on MSPaint.